Often confused with that other Parker, Sarah Jessica, Mary Louise, the part-Swedish daughter of a military officer and judge, was listed as one of twelve “Promising New Actors of 1990” in Screen World. She attended the North Carolina School of the Arts and began her stage career in New York in the mid-1980s, soon after, earning a 1990 Tony nomination for her performance in Prelude to a Kiss. Her breakthrough movie came in 1991 in Fried Green Tomatoes. While professing a preference for the stage, she continued to build her movie career with roles in a string of movies, including Mr. Wonderful (1993), Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway (1994), and alongside Nicole Kidman in Portrait of a Lady (1996). In 1996 she teamed up with Billy Crudup in the stage revival of Bus Stop. Her performance in How I Learned to Drive won her an Obie Award in 1997, and in 2001 she won a Tony for Best Actress in Proof after it made a successful transfer to Broadway. Parker has also appeared in a number of TV movies, most memorably, playing singer Phyllis McGuire in the HBO biopic Sugartime (1995).